Classifying and verifying fake news in social media

Helen Creswick, Christian Karner and Martin Flintham are currently working on an interdisciplinary research project looking at fake news in social media.

A literature review is currently underway and two key taxonomy’s have emerged around types of fake news and categories of verification.

Rubin et al (2017) argue that there are three types of ‘fake’ news:

Serious fabrication: referring to the sensationalising or exaggerations of events.

Large-scale hoaxes: where audiences are deliberately deceived about a news story.

Humorous fakes: which is distinguished from serious fabrications by the humorous nature of the story.

Liu et al (2015) propose six categories of verification of the authenticity of a tweet:

Source Credibility: trusted account, url or application name

Source Identity: profile name, location, professional information

Source Diversity: Multiple non-news urls

Source Location & Witness: matched location for tweet and profile

Message Belief: support, negation, question or neutrality

Event Propagation: retweet, mention, hashtag h-index

These will both act as a foundation for a framework for classifying the characteristics of fake news. This framework will be used to structure our investigation into user’s perceptions and decisions regarding the veracity of digital news articles. Next steps for the project are to design a series of studies to explore instances of fake news in users news feeds.

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This is a blog to share inspirational examples and informative approaches to the use of digital services and technologies in our research community. It is curated by the Digital Research Specialist Team. Please contact your Faculty Digital Research Specialist if you would like to author a post.